Because listening is a vital part of language learning, listening skills should be developed as a learning mode. Pre-listening skills should be taught just as pre-reading skills are taught. Children in command of the auditory perceptual abilities which contribute most to listening will transfer these abilities to increasingly difficult listening task, e.g., listening for comprehension. Six areas for pre-listening development have been isolated: perceiving the position of a stimulus in space and time, perceiving figure-ground relationship, perceiving stimulus constancy, perceiving spatial and temporal relationships, auditory-motor coordination, and perceiving the nature (structure) or the subject matter (sound). All six strategies are developed as listening tasks, first in the context of nonlinguistic sounds and then in the context of speech. A list of references is included. (Author/VM)